Looking For Alaska Themes

In a world seemingly good to dreamers, there comes a time when reality must be found. Alaska Young, a young girl in the fiction novel Looking For Alaska by John Green, is one of those dreamers who has also found a dark reality. The book is narrated by Miles “Pudge” Halter, a teenager who moves from a public school in Florida to a boarding school in Alabama. Towards the beginning of the book, Miles explains that he is in search for a Great Perhaps, as spoken about in the poet Francois Rabelais’s last words, “I go to seek a great perhaps”. As Miles’s journey begins, he meets a girl named Alaska who seems to be the most mysterious and intriguing person that Miles has met. There are two parts of the book: Before and After. Before is the time that
These themes are often illustrated through symbols of actions that Alaska commits. An example of Alaska symbolizing death itself is every time she smokes a cigarette. This is made clear through Alaska expressing her thoughts of cigarettes to Pudge, “Alaska finished her cigarette and flicked it into the river. 'Why do you smoke so damn fast?' I asked. She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, 'Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die” (page 44). With this symbol of death being emphasized, the theme of death becomes clearer as the story unfolds. This symbol also gives some foreshadowing seeing that in the end, Alaska does die young just as she wanted to. With the theme of death comes another common theme in the book that is eternal life. A symbol that depicts eternal life in the book is that of white flowers. "There was this little white daisy on the bank of the creek, and all of a sudden she just jumped waist-deep into the water and waded across and grabbed it. She put it behind her ear, and when I asked her about it, she told me that her parents always put white flowers in her hair when she was little” (pg. 13). Alaska’s innocence from the time she was young, to the age of seventeen is shown through white flowers. For it was white flowers that her mother loved and that Alaska always gave to her mother on the anniversary of her death. It was white flowers that Alaska had drawn on a notepad on the night of her death. In the end, it was white flowers that Pudge decided Alaska would always live forever because she was matter and matter cannot be created nor